Concealed carry permitholder stops stabbing rampage in Utah

A man stabbed two people at the Smith’s Marketplace grocery store in downtown Salt Lake City before being subdued by a bystander.

The attack took place around 5:30 p.m. in the parking lot of the store at 455 South and 500 East. According to a witness, it appears one man was stabbed in the side of the head and another was stabbed in the stomach. The exact condition of the victims is unknown, but police believe the injuries are very serious and possibly critical.

Police say a bystander with a concealed carry permit witnessed the attack and stepped in to keep it from escalating.

“(The bystander) was suspicious of what might be going on, and when he saw the stabbing, he just drew his pistol and challenged the individual,” which caused the alleged attacker to lie down on the ground, Brian Purvis with the Salt Lake City Police Department said. By the time police officers arrived on the scene, the man was subdued and is now in custody.

The attacker apparently bought the knife inside the store.

When seconds count, the police can take minutes to arrive. Lives can be saved by legally-owned firearms.

Politicians predicted disaster.: “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,”: Washington’s Mayor: Adrian Fenty: warned the day the court made its decision.

Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would: “go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets…”

The New York Times even editorialized this month about: the Supreme Court’s “unwise” decision that there is a right for people “to keep guns in the home.”

But Armageddon never happened.: Newly released data for Chicago: shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn’t rise after the bans were eliminated – they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate.

by Sir John Hawkins

John Hawkins's book 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know is filled with lessons that newly minted adults need in order to get the most out of life. Gleaned from a lifetime of trial, error, and writing it down, Hawkins provides advice everyone can benefit from in short, digestible chapters.

Not surprisingly, the national media have been completely silent about this news.

One can only imagine the coverage if crime rates had risen. In the first six months of this year, there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year — back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982.

Meanwhile, the other four most populous cities saw a total drop at the same time of only 6 percent.

Similarly, in the year after the 2008 “Heller” decision, the murder rate fell two-and-a-half times faster in Washington than in the rest of the country.

It also fell more than three as fast as in other cities that are close to Washington’s size. And murders in Washington have continued to fall.

If you: compare the first six months of this year to the first six months of 2008, the same time immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s late June “Heller” decision, murders have now fallen by thirty-four percent.

Gun crimes also fell more than non-gun crimes.

Robberies with guns fell by 25%, while robberies without guns have fallen by eight percent. Assaults with guns fell by 37%, while assaults without guns fell by 12%.

Just as with right-to-carry laws, when law-abiding citizens have guns some criminals stop carrying theirs.

Americans overall are far less likely to be killed with a firearm than they were when it was much more difficult to obtain a concealed-weapons permit, according to: statistics collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control.: But researchers have not been able to establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the concealed-carry movement gained steam, Americans were killed by others with guns at the rate of about 5.66 per 100,000 population. In this decade, the rate has fallen to just over 4.07 per 100,000, a 28 percent drop. The decline follows a fivefold increase in the number of “shall-issue” and unrestricted concealed-carry states from 1986 to 2006.The highest gun homicide rate is in Washington, D.C., which has had the nation’s strictest gun-control laws for years and bans concealed carry: 20.50 deaths per 100,000 population, five times the general rate. The lowest rate, 1.12, is in Utah, which has such a liberal concealed weapons policy that most American adults can get a permit to carry a gun in Utah without even visiting the state.

The decline in gun homicides also comes as U.S. firearm sales are skyrocketing, according to federal background checks that are required for most gun sales. After holding stable at 8.5 to 9 million checks from 1999 to 2005, the FBI reported a surge to 10 million in 2006, 11 million in 2007, nearly 13 million in 2008 and more than 14 million last year, a 55 percent increase in just four years.

If you ever need to debate this, I recommend buying these academic studies published by the: University of Chicago Press: and by: Harvard University Press. The former shows how crime rates dropped in the USA when Americans rescinded gun control laws, and the latter shows how crime rates rose in the UK when the British strengthened their gun control laws. Sometimes is good to have the data handy.